Follow Blog via Email

Pages

Recent Comments

Have a PhD in History; but am currently unemployed, and have been underemployed and unemployed since receiving that doctorate degree.
Have traveled around the world and have lived in various cities across the world, mostly in Europe and in the Americas. Served four years in the US military as a non-combattant.

The names and forms of ideological groups often speak volumes about both their directions – and their mental chains.

Christians have often named their sects after their founders, such as Lutherans, Calvinists, Mormons, Wesleyans, Nestorians, Arians, Franciscans, Swedenborgians, Augustinians, Dominicans, or they have dubbed themselves according to their theological obsessions, such as Old Believers, Orthodox, Christian Science, Catholics, Adventists, Christadelphians, Baptists, Methodists, Jesuits, Carmelites.

Some Christians have identified their groupings according to race, and mostly due to Christianity’s part invention and support of racialism. Two examples represent the African Episcopal Methodists and the Chinese Baptists. Other Christian groups have used similar ethno-nationalist terms, such as the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Armenian, Byzantine, Assyrian, Anglican, German Brethren, French Reformed, Dutch Reformed, Latin Catholic Rite, Eastern Catholic Rite.

Like the myriad of Christian cults in our modern world, Marxist sect groups have also named themselves after their revolutionary idols, such as Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Stalinists, Guevarists, Trotskyists, or they have used titles proportional to their political fixations, such as Social Democrats, National Socialists, Socialist Worker, Socialist Action, Christian Liberationists, United Left, Popular Fronts, Left Front, Left Coalitions, Socialist Labor, Revolutionary Communists, Revolutionary Socialists. Like the Christians, Leftists also enjoy designating themselves according to their ethno-nationalist origins, such as Russian Communists, British Laborites, Spanish Socialists, French Communists, Indian Marxists.

Unfortunately, we Anarchists also have our ideological fronts, divisions, tendencies, sectarian splits and particular cliques. Unlike the Christians and Marxists, we do not label ourselves according to our religious-sect founders, nor do we name ourselves in relation to ethno-nationalist groups. We have no Bakuninists, nor Kropotkinists, nor Anarchists of America, nor any United Spanish Anarchists. However, we do label ourselves in proportion to our peculiar inclinations.

The biggest division within Anarchism is between the Insurrectionists and Civic Anarchists. The Insurrectionists use incendiary sabotage, hacktivism, retaliatory violence and property destruction against targeted elites, or the propaganda of the deed. The Civic Anarchists, use direct picketing, immediate shut downs, business boycotts, abandoned building or land squatting, direct media publishing, new age traveling, spontaneous street parties, natural medicine distributions, petty shoplifting, dumpster diving, free learning classes and totally free markets in order maintain some cultural autonomy.

Yet there are many Anarchists that use both tactics, and in fact, true Anarchist revolutionaries, use both methods. Both tendencies unite under the double activities of Anarchy: Direct Action and Mutual Aid.

Direct Action is the offense. It implies the Anarchist Act over Anarchist Words. As we say in America: walk the walk, over talking the talk. Mutual Aid is the defense, and it implies that if you reject the State, then help out others, and share with your fellow Anarchists through every facet of life: food, clothes, shelter, medical care, self-defense and cultural, non-institutional, education activities.

Within contemporary Anarchy, there is, unfortunately, a lot more words than Direct Action, and there is very little Mutual Aid that remains in Anarchist subcultures. With all of the Anarchist tendencies, and even the contradictory ones, they all unite under the hatred of the State – even if they create mini-States within their very own organizations.

Anarchy has unfortunately fallen into similar pits of ideological mess and hodgepodge as the Christian cult institutions and the Marxist-Leftist sect gangs. This is because of our ideological history, when Anarchy had first called itself Anarchism, or Anarcho-Syndicalism.

This ideological situation also has relations to the beginning of the armed struggle, fighting on both fronts: anti-Statism and anti-Capitalism. Around 130 years ago, and also due to possessing common enemies, Anarchists consorted among the other Leftist tendencies, such as the Socialists and the Communists.

What saved Anarchy from Marxist vanguardist and Christian sectarian mental illness was the Punk movement beginning in the 1970s. Punk rock culture returned Rock music to its roots through playing the original rock music, of Black-Working Class rebellion, and with this authentic return, Punk acted in full revolt against the wage slave-work-consumerist culture of Capitalist society. A few bands, such as the Clash, publicly exposed the State criminals and murderers. But like all cultural expressions of ‘rebellion,’ Capitalist culture fought back and eventually co-opted a good deal of the music and fashion sense.

There are still Anarcho-Syndicalists, or Anarcho working class agitators. They often fight through union organizing struggles, the most notable being the IWW, One Big Union, or the Wobblies. Once and a while they do have organizing successes against the bosses because they don’t have the six-figure salary, typical union boss overhead, i.e., the AFL-CIO union hacks, nor do they sell-out the workers during the contract negotiations. The Anarcho-Syndicalists know full well how the Capitalist system functions. Still, the IWW ‘Wobs’ often meet more defeats than victories, and Global Monopoly Capitalism is a lot more powerful than Industrial Capitalism was about a hundred years ago. The rotten capitalist system continues as strong as ever.

Another ideological tendency in contemporary Anarchism is Anarcho-Primitivism, or Green Anarchy. This view represents Anarchy united with a certain element of the Environmentalist movement. This orientation finds that our technology has become a literal social and cultural monolith, and that it has sucked out the joy and magic from our already dismal existence. Technological institutions have replaced Capitalist institutions as the destroyers of the living. Those Anarchists have been right about our dire situation – but it is too late now. Most of humanity has allowed both the laziness and slavery of technology to infiltrate their lives. This woeful actuality includes Anarchist subcultures.

Other contradictory ideologies have latched on to the Anarchy brand. In the United States, there is a large Anarcho-Capitalist perspective. They tend to write blogs, make videos, and have informal gatherings. Some of them are just as hard-core as the other previously mentioned Anarchist groups. This sect believes that there is a true possibility for a totally free capitalist market between willing individuals, and that technology will open and facilitate this freedom.

They use parts of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and take it to the American Libertarian fringe. The issue with this group is that many of them did not continue their readings with Adam Smith. In his Wealth of Nations, (published at the time of the American Revolution), Smith wrote that modern Capitalism absolutely needs the help of the State.

All socio-economic activities require some type of arbitration, or the markets will cease existing as actual markets – and will thus become nasty examples of Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest. Why pay for a product, if you can shoot the seller in the head, keep your money and the prize? And there’s the other way around, why give away your product, if you can just take the seller’s money and shoot the buyer in the head afterwards?

There are also Anarcho-Nationalists, or Anarcho-Fascists. These sects embrace the idea of race, nation and people over other inferior groups or enemies, yet they don’t want a State. How could they even conceive of such a society? How would they even defend themselves from their enemies, which have to fight them eventually since their ideology is so extreme, without even resorting to a state? The only way to mobilize any modern military organization is the institution of the modern state.

And yes, there still exist the Anarcho-Communists. They want a Communist society without a Communist state. They see hope for a utopia vision of a Communist society inside the writings of Karl Marx – or possibly Thomas More’s Utopia, or perchance, the pre-European invaded, Native societies of the Americas? This political cult forgets that humans cannot retrace their steps back into the dark realms of human history. We are very different from those earlier societies. The modern capitalist state destroyed those societies for a reason. We simply can never return to the past.

There are also the sub-sects of Anarcho-Nihilists, who reject all politics, and Anarcho-Surrealists who prefer to fight the system through anti-corporate media activities, even creating ‘anti-events,’ where they counter co-opted festivals and exhibitions.

Anarchy returns to its full circle around the A.

Our only noble fight left remains Autonomy. We cannot destroy any modern class society because there will always exist certain humans that crave power, control and authority, and even inside Anarchist circles; nor can we return to a historical period with less technology and smaller communities. Our minds have permanently mutated through the repetitive use of technology, and through learning brutal habits, while surviving inside the urban monster, called the megalopolis.

Autonomy means that we use all of our personal energies and efforts to maintain both our dignity and honor. We should try to avoid laboring and destroying ourselves inside any demeaning wage slave work. We ought to live our lives the way we see fit. We can refrain from consumerist buying, striving for the Amerikan nightmare, taking out loans, investing in pyramid schemes, borrowing, lending and gambling.

We could remain physically free to live outside of the cages and shackles of the prison industrial complex and the State supported institutional system, which includes hospital clinics, state mandated schools and police-paramilitary units.

We would prefer death over some open or disguised form of slavery. Our dignity and honor depend on maintaining these freedoms and liberties. If we live as Anarchists, then we can never trade nor sell out our sacred autonomy. Autonomy is all that remains.

Human civilization has made its own history through the tempests of culture and creation.

But with all of civilization’s benefits, humanity simultaneously cursed itself to permanent warfare. Warfare does not just exist on the battlefields with armies and weapons; it also functions inside the unjust and unequal distributions of class power within both society and culture. The warfare of urbanization has represented one of the most absurd attributes, whirling inside the tragic saga of the human condition.

Humans have left the sanctity of the land, the hearth, and the family, in order to transform themselves into subjects under the weary gaze of the rulers. The subjects receive a new identity, and yet they become targets for both the rulers and the enemies of the rulers. Wherever there are political rulers, there are always enemies. A minute faction from the subject population reaches into the ruling clique, while another minute faction joins the enemy camp.

Some human ideas have been beneficial to civilization, such as fire for culinary, metallic-sculpture and martial arts, and the wheel for transport, industry and the ceramic arts.

The human invention of urbanization helped deliver civilization to Homo sapiens sapiens. The urban subject no longer had the obligation to work inside the Earth and hunt for food. They could attend to their own private gardens and enjoy the bounty of culture found in the city.

But there was also a terrible price on their heads, and a nasty fear had piqued those very subjects. What if the rulers became tyrants and then decided to sacrifice their own subjects in order to hold on to their own power? What if the enemies of the rulers surrounded, starved out and sacked the city, enslaving everything away in chains – including the subjects private belongings, and even destroying completely people’s extended families?

One of Urbanism’s stage right onto human history represented the 6 century BCE. On the Gulf Coast of Mexico lived a great people, referred to later in history, as the people of the rubber, or the ‘Olmecs.’

The land was good. The warm, balmy climate offered an agricultural abundance, yet its tempests disciplined the cities. The winds could bite, and yet they spread their ethereal honey on the plants and maize. The rains sometimes drenched and drowned the unwary travelers. Plants still made love to the rain. The reeds were often harsh to touch, but they helped in maintaining the delicate balance. Everything drank from the earth’s sacred blood, and then it all cascaded deep into the rain’s sacred liquid pools.

In the Olmec world, an impressive city of stone had stood proud to the world, and it possessed a marvelous large pyramid of brown boulder rocks in the center. Around the pyramid were bulky grey temple structures and some thick quarry palaces for the ruler’s family, noble relations, and priests. The massive stone pyramid holding the dark glare, gave the subjects a sense of identity, and it seemed that the calendar rituals and religious festivals truly connected to the earth world at both the cave level and sky worlds.

Sacrificial bloodletting enabled the elites to perform the magic effortlessly. All subjects possessed their blood lines to the city’s elites, whether through artisan, merchant or farmer relations. Their blood ties also ran deep into three distinct categories: territory, family and service-labor obligations.

Everybody had their own economic niche and knew their place within the city. There were no vagabonds or beggars, and no one starved on the streets. There weren’t any issues with festering garbage refuse, nor with rampant disease. The city was actually quite small compared to modern standards. It only had a few thousand residents. But each resident existed as part of a grander family, and an even larger kinship group. Everyone recognized his or her own sacred hearth and home within the great urban polity. The Olmecs were living in an almost paradise.

Yet, the urban polity felt unsettled about the constant warfare, the enemies that led sudden attacks, or even the unknown wrath of natural disasters, such as storms, quakes and floods. Like all things in the cosmos, the times began to change, with war and disaster occurring more frequently and more devastatingly. What was actually changing, if the same rituals of sacrifice and devotions had always stayed the same?

The elite families could change the rules for obligatory labor services and tribute taxes. With the continual wars, they often did demand more from the subjects. Living in a great city was a divine gift, but at the same time, the subject lived in dread of the elites’ magical and violent powers. What if the wars led directly to them? What if the city had actually defeated the enemies, yet the enemies had already destroyed all the family and kin ties?

Better to live free and easy than under the tutelage of a powerful, military dynasty – even with all of the blood ties. The subjects slowly began to leave the cities. They preferred to farm out in the mountains, near the water sources, runs, and forest clearings. Eventually, more people began to leave the city for the basic freedom found in the abundant Earth. About two hundred and fifty years later, after so many more years of warfare and emigration, the magical and powerful city stood abandoned.

The ancient city had its days in the light of civilization, and even the ancient Olmec elites knew that their cities would die in the distant future – just like the old dynasties and the old, decrepit great grandfathers.

Our modern cities are vastly different however. These blights on humanity refuse to die and the political-economic elites that run such cities have used every conceivable criminal trick within the shadowy schemas of history to continue their misrule. Our modern monsters want their hells to live forever in order to burn and flay the ignorant and poor masses. And like always, they seem to get away with their horrifying games of corruption.

Our modern cities have become suffocating nightmares representing the perversions of global monopoly capitalism strangled with rampant state consolidation, street level criminality, institutional corruption, and city hall tyranny. Meanwhile, the urban subjects have to shame themselves continuously in watching the slow dying of the homeless, while enduring the public signs that threaten fines and imprisonment with those public, intrusive billboards that advertise useless crap.

Within the chasm of modern urbanism, most of us must deal with street hustling and the brutality of open poverty. Most terribly, the rulers constantly threaten their own citizens in demanding regular payments for all of this madness. The subjects must submit to unending and augmenting protection monies through rent paying, housing frauds, bad public transit, utility extortions, municipal and sales taxes, street fines, parking fees and wage slavery.

Meanwhile, the urban masses endure the miseries of contaminated dirt, household pests, rude behaviors, flim flam artists, common insults and reckless property pimping. The three wild animals that tend to survive in these environments are rats, cockroaches and pigeons. That our modern, urban populations do not end up as crazed lunatics on the streets, explains the marvelous surviving power of the human will under civilization.

Some crap historians have stated that this urban system of decay has always existed within human civilization. This is another abject and hideous lie. The Greek polis had only few thousand actual citizens. Ancient citizens fully participated in the life of the polis, whether at war, peace, festivals or simply speaking truth to power in the public markets and plazas. No citizen had to live a marginalized existence. Those cities were more like medieval monasteries without all the rules, controls, living in cells, and hiding away from the public. The Greek polis lived as a tight community of citizen-warriors-pleaders engaged in the full plenary of an urban, spiritual life.

The imperial Roman city had changed greatly since the days of Peloponnesian Wars in the Hellenic peninsula, (during the fifth century BCE), but the spirit of the polis still survived – and even as ancient imperial Rome, (around the second century AD), had reached a population level of few hundred thousand.

Urban Romans generally lived in two types of housing, either in the ‘domus,’ or a type of round-square urban house with a garden and front patio, or in ‘insulae,’ which were small apartments in block buildings. These homes had no glass windows and anyone could enter the domus patios and the insulae apartments. The Romans had little need for privacy because the Roman state did not imprison and murder their own citizens over personal conduct. People lived in the public realm because the honor of the community was more important for social cohesion.

The insulae dwellers did not pay our contemporary rent extortions as some historians have stated; instead, the residents of the insulae paid for their housing through labor or service obligations, within the personal political economy where the lesser clients worked for their wealthier patrons. Roman insulae dwellers received a regular dole of bread and some other foodstuffs for basic survival. No Roman complained about such a dole because an urban resident received the basic rights for survival and community support.

All Roman citizens could take part in the political and public life of the market, or the ‘forum.’ Citizens had the right to use the public baths and bathrooms of the cities, called, ‘latrinae.’ All citizens gathered their drinking water, cleaning water and community news at the public fountains. Roman public life also frequented the market stalls where each city street had a particular artisan craft on display, called ‘tabernae.’

Roman elites also built their far off cities, called ‘colonae,’ for a specific population size, and all urban citizens, whether soldier or artisan, possessed full inclusion within the greater urban life. Romanization was not just an arrogant Caesar conquering a territory, it also represented an inclusive, small city for all nations that desiring to live the Roman, urban, imperial dream.

How did our modern cities become the horrors of horrors that they are today? We can thank European imperialism and mercantile capitalism, with their invasions, prisons, epidemics, colonialism, slavery and mass murder, around the middle of the sixteenth-century, or the 1500s.

European Colonialism destroyed the ancient cities and the marvelous wonders around the world. It replaced them with the health horrors that still fester in our days. The European colonial invaders who hated washing and cleanliness wanted to infect the rest of the world with their own miseries. In that sense, they were successful.

The European colonial powers enforced mercantile capitalism through its brutal monopolies, massive land thefts, slave trading and export plantations that worked the kidnapped laborers to death. Mass kidnapping rings located off the coasts of West Africa could always replenish the exterminated labor pool.

European colonial statecraft set up the first prisons, Inquisitions, witch hunting tribunals, and other wondrous torture methods to scare the cowardly. European authorities imposed the first forced conversions in order to exterminate the native cultures. The European colonial city had thus transformed into cauldrons of sickness, disease and the bad death. And like all epidemics, they have spread out into the entire human world.

The European colonial elites further perverted modern urbanism through dividing the colonial city into racial caste and social class sections. There was one destitute section for the colonized victims and the other poor losers, where there was another nicer section, usually around the city center, for the colonial bureaucrats and military commanders, inclusive of wealthy slave traders and slave owners who owned their second homes.

We still see such eyesores today. We have our ghettos ransacked with no jobs or brutal jobs that pay badly, abandoned buildings, disease and rodent infestations, run down, street crime ridden sections of town, and next we have our gentrified, hipster zones where the easy job, six figure salary people enjoy clean, well-stocked supermarkets with eclectic cafe-bar-restaurants. The city’s government juntas don’t care about how many people move into their urban wastelands, which chew out their millions of victims. The more poor vermin that enter, the greater the slave wage, reserve army of labor population pool. These massive, megalopolis cities literally feed from the trough of criminal neglect.

Large cities that are also capital cities are even worse off than the megalopolis cities. A large population of the capital city essentially exists on state parasitism. These state spongers include paper pushing government bureaucrats, military, judicial, legislative managers, political executives, numerous guard-security-police forces, and other useless appendages, such as media hacks, corporate consultants and ideological front groups. They offer no useful skills to society whatsoever – except in maintaining the supremacy of central, state and municipal government power.

There is no hope in changing such blights on humanity and on the Earth. The smart losers become wiseguys, gangsters and street thugs, while the sad others have to either beg for the privilege of becoming a wage-rent paying slave, or the real unfortunates, sensitive others, just abandon all hope and wait to die horribly on the city streets. Suicide through urban neglect.

Many fall into the traps and permanent craters of modern, urban life. Some will die painfully from mental-physical illness, or they will become hopeless addicts partying on bad, cheap drugs. Some others just spend the rest of their days in the prison-gulag-concentration camp system. A few will make it as low-level, legal assassins for the state’s military institution. Eventually, poverty, war and misery will tear apart most of their fragile minds and bodies.

Living within our modern urban pits, the political-economic elites have continued their relentless war against us. We Anarchists know this truth and so we only have one option remaining: we must fight against such injustices through both our dignity and honor.

We can squat abandoned buildings. We could wheat paper and spray paint over their threatening signs, or we can set up spontaneous parties in the city streets. We might also set up free kitchens, guerrilla gardens, and feedings, or arrange a free, bartering market in a public park – or even occupy central city locations and make them our own domains.

We have only our personal wills to mental freedom – these gifts still remain with us.

The wonders of feeling served, cared for, and looked after represent some of our greatest life experiences. Even when we are physically ill, good rest and wholesome care help us to achieve that piece of mind and marvelous plateau of comfort. These actions display the gifts of unconditional love and they can eventually lead to true healing.

One of the most brutal aspects inside the culture of modern capitalism has been its perversion of such care. Whether they have the names of ‘health care, culinary centers,’ or ‘festival parks,’ capitalism has mugged and institutionalized the older enchantments of strong familial relations and community bonds into their profit-making enterprises.

These institutions have even gone farther into the crimes of legal theft and profiteering. The occult history of restaurants actually began in China during the 1200s, and for our modern restos, in France during the 1700s.

On a rough day in 1760s Paris, a coarse gentleman was clumping in the thin, narrow, cobblestone and nasty dirt, medieval streets of the city. The season was the beginning of an early winter in late November. The cold air was dead with frost, yet whips of cool wind fury could brutally bite the toughest soldier. He was also walking during the ratty, early morning hours. The sky had possessed an overcast grey muddy tinge that led to more foreboding.

The man wore his black hair in long locks with a tail at the end. He was clothed in an overcoat, a vest, a white blouse shirt, and unlike other wealthier men at the time, had on worker pants, while his long black leather boots covered his lower pant legs. He was of medium height, mostly clean-shaven, except for a permanent stubble on the chin and cheeks, and his face had that look of deep thought mixed with the pains of human suffering. He suffered from a mysterious illness inside his belly, a common ailment for that historical time.

He was actually walking to a ‘restaurant,’ a specialized medical dining hall that would hopefully ‘restaurer,’ or restore his health. There were a few in Paris, and this one was famous for its large spoon and bowl over the front door that advertised its palliative care. In those days, they still didn’t use numbers for specific addresses.

When he finally arrived at the care place, there were already a group of men, women and children sitting at the common table. The common table had the name of ‘table d’hôte,’ or the host’s table. He sat down at the end and already felt a nagging feeling.

The hostess suddenly slammed the large soup containers, hard bread, and salt in the middle of the large wooden, dirty table. The center mass of sick people began to hog the soup for the best choices of boiled chicken scrap, ‘bouillon,’ or broth, and seasonal cooked veggies. The bowl went around the table and so the people at the ends had to deal with what was left over. Eating at these places was often a surprise, since the meals often sat for a long time in large pots over the kitchen fire. Such was the ‘pot luck’ in those days. The tired man ate his food and paid his usual cheap ‘écus’ for the simple fare.

He also noticed some out-of-town travelers from the provinces at the table. The hostess charged them the ‘traveler’ fee, which was more expensive. He felt lucky in that he was a ‘Parisian’ local and knew the going rate. Until this very day, many restaurants are notorious for trying to fleece and legally rob unwary customers and out-of-town visitors.

This type of restaurant lasted until the French Revolution of the 1790s. By the beginning of the nineteenth-century, the 1800s, unemployed cooks that had previously worked for the parasitical ‘aristocrats’ began to advertise their culinary skills. If they had any capital, they could open a ‘restaurant’ for the ‘bourgeoisie,’ or upper class, owner-elites. These elites wanted to taste the exquisite plates from the previous epoch of sensual-gluttonous, aristo dining, represented by ten course meals.

The cooks offered ‘menus,’ or selected plates for the day at fixed prices and at certain eating times of the day. The cook owners cut up the tables to make sure there was greater privacy for the paying diners. Such was the birth of the modern restaurant that still spits out its notoriety.

Fine restaurants have continued to thrive as the ultimate conspicuous show of elitism and consumption. The wealthy elites can eat the ‘fine food,’ and enjoy the restaurant ambience, while they thumb their noses at the lower classes that cannot often afford to dine out.

Restaurants would soon perfect their harsh, capitalist division of labor. First came the owner, then the day-to-day manager, next the hot cook, or main cook, ‘le chef,’ and later, the front staff, waiters and hosts, or ‘serveurs.’ and finally the rest of the back staff – busboys, prep and assistant cold plate cooks – and the lowly dishwasher-general cleaner. But in China, five hundred years earlier, the restaurant existed as the extension of the spice and food market.

During the Sung dynasty in China, around the 1230s, this political dynasty had constructed a new capital and market center called Hangzhou. Hangzhou was not an ordinary city for those times. This megalopolis sold every type of imaginable fish, meat, vegetable and fruit – and most importantly, herbs and spices. Within the massive market, the traveler could find Muslim merchants coming from their routes in Africa and Asia, and even well-traveled Jewish merchant traders resided in the city. Famous world travelers visited the site, such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The city was also the most populous city in the world with over one million inhabitants.

Within the canal and urban jungle labyrinth of markets, buyers and sellers, the visitor could taste the culinary wonders of the world. The majestic stories were quite famous concerning the beautiful city on the lake and the green hills surrounding it. The wonderful foods, tastes, exotic sights, stalls, markets, herbs, smells, and spices enchanted Europeans accustomed to the harsh medieval cereal, legume and vegetable diet.

European elites began to desire a more refined table and palette, and they also wanted more culinary art diversity and a regular diet of diverse meats and fishes.

Local food preparers in Hangzhou prepared stuffed dumpling delights, and mixed noodle and soup plates. These European elite desires for the gourmet plate led to the colonial sea race in order to find another maritime route to India, China and the South Seas, (or the South China Sea lands of Malays, Siamese, Khmers, Laos, and Annam-Champa, or Vietnam).

Six hundred years later, elite Europeans would become the colonial-imperial curse on the Earth. European elites had idolized the sensuality of food over the healthy and hearty diet of the European peasant. The display of wealth and class power had trumped the warm feeling of family and community around a simple, yet tasty fare.

Our modern restaurant is the sacred symbol of food idolatry, small time savage capitalism and the fraudulent display of class position. The resto ultimately serves the rich and lazy that refuse to cook for themselves. The elites want the culinary arts that come with money, yet they refuse to do the labor. Someone else must labor, and labor mercilessly, in order for the money people to enjoy the experience – and the profiteering.

This vice is especially true for the restaurant owners. They might know a lot about food, and a few might even have worked as chefs before, but their main hankering is for a profit, or taking advantage of the mark, or customer, and the laboring staff. If this means buying cheap, genetically modified wholesale food for consumption, leaving out side dish food in metal canisters with plastic wrap for over a month, charging triple prices for cheap drinks, or even taking half-eaten food scraps and putting them in the general use bins – they will do it. The restaurant owner truly wants to make a profit, not feed humanity out of love.

Some restaurant owners have never done kitchen work in their lives. They simply inherited the joint from their parents, or as small time capitalists, they went into restaurant work because they thought that the money would come quickly and easily. They often hire their friends and buddies from previous business ventures, and who also know very little about food and drinks, to manage the dives. Woe unto the service workers that have to deal with these restaurant hells. If the city health inspectors really did their jobs, they would close those rancid places down.

US Restaurants often attract the most vicious, petty, mean, and cheap bosses from the small business owner class, or the petit bourgeoisie. Due to the heavy use of cash, the restaurant racket, like construction, can easily hide the underground economy, or ‘under the table’ money, from the government. In America, the owners can get away with paying a slave wage to the front staff, since the marks, or the customers, are partly required to pay the servers’ wages through ‘tips.’

Also in America, restaurants like construction, hotels and cleaning services, are the mainstays in hiring illegal immigrant workers, In restaurants, they all tend to work and stay hidden in the back kitchen. If the kitchen workers complain, then a call to the Immigration Service will suffice. I have even seen with my own eyes, Latino-mestizo workers from Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador doing the hot cooking in varied ethnic restaurants, such as Indian, Japanese, French, Ethiopian and Thai places!

I have my own personal work stories. When I was younger, I only worked in the back kitchen as a dishwasher for the desperation of needed travel money. I usual bolted when I had made enough cash, or the managers just fired me for religiously taking my breaks. I noticed that many of the young cooks were serious hard drug addicts and a few even sold hard drugs from the back doors.

The waitresses also acted nasty and rude. There were some serious infighting and petty hatreds between the cooks, hosts and servers. The restaurant boss had successfully used the old divide and conquer strategy. No wonder coffee was always free to the wage and tip slaves. Worker turnover was always high.

The workers often counterattacked by making deals with the bartender, including sleeping with him or her, in order to cop free drinks – after the lazy owner went AWOL from the job. The cooks stole copious amounts of food for their own late night deep-frying. The petty and pathetic servers with bad attitudes even made fun of the regular customers to the other staff, who generally ordered their usual meals and drinks – and yet tipped those assholes well.

Some Anarchists counter the anti-restaurant arguments by arguing in favor of vegan-cooperative ventures, or small, family owned restaurants and ethnic food enclaves. But these restaurant options suffer from the same diseases of capitalism – making more money.

If all restaurants use funny money, than they have to make some base profit in order to survive. In family ethnic restaurants the bosses are still bosses and often demand that all the workers share their tips with the owner, which is one of the last holdouts of feudalism. In order for alternative coops to make money, they have to cut corners too, and especially with food freshness. Vegetarian-vegan hipster cooperatives are often the worst abusers of reusing old breads, rice, millet and quinoa, and nuking pre-prepared plates, often made a few days ago, inside of their multiple microwaves – so much for freshness.

If a regular customer that likes to go out to eat and could see inside the actual kitchens and operations of restaurants, then he or she would refrain from visiting them regularly. The real issue, and especially for us Anarchists, is not succumbing to the vicious culture of global capitalism. We continue to pay the servers through our tips in order to help a cheap small business owner make a profit.

We could do the cooking labor at our homes, or at someone else’s house where the fare is often better than the resto variety. At least we know the freshness content of the food we are using. Cooking is also an art, and it is open to all of us humans, since we all do art in some form. Eating out is quite expensive too.

In our contemporary world, we cannot simply avoid restaurants and ban them completely from our lives. But we can cherish those special visits and occasions at our local eating place with family and friends and during festivities.

For those of us that travel, we often have no choice in the matter. If we are in a foreign country, then we would also want to try the local dishes. Youth hostels offer a good option for travelers since most of them have shared kitchens for guests.

We should always remember that the modern restaurant began as an informal medical place for the sick. If we are alive and still healthy, then let’s control our own food consumption and share the cooking within our own families and among our own small, friendly communities.